From the rear cover: "The poetry of James McKee’s debut collection The Stargazers invites readers to engage with personal intensities of love, grief and time’s passage as well as with the looming forces of climate change, entrenched oppression, and weaponized history. His language effects, while it scrutinizes, a continuous transit from the interior myths of selfhood to the collective fictions that sustain nation-states and religions. He writes as one who believes that any poetic stratagem, from meter to metaphor, should first serve to arrest the speedy progress of present experience onward into oblivion. And so, amid the numbing, cacaphonous welter of 21st Century American life, McKee’s poems undertake serial acts of rescue and refusal, of commemoration and condemnation, of compelled lyric outburst and deliberative public engagement. If art, as Picasso said, is “a lie that shows us the truth,” these poems neither hide their status as objects of artifice, nor despair of offering their readers the mysterious pleasure of the clarifying word."